It’s mostly technology I can buy on eBay in America, and any Russian citizen can buy on eBay or whatever in Russia. Drones this small don’t talk to satellites – they transmit imagery to ground stations or record it onboard for later use. The U.S. and Russia already know what frequencies and encoding each side uses for controlling small drones. It’s hardly an intelligence windfall for the U.S.

The downing of a small few-hundred-dollar drone is hardly news. They are designed and built to be expendable. The Russian guys operating this drone were probably mad that it got shot down, but are going to walk back to their equipment trailer and grab another one of the dozen or so they must have. They don’t send out reconnaissance drone teams with a single drone, and they will just use another one of the thousands of encoded frequencies they use for the next drone. This little drone is hardly like a $17 million dollar satellite-controlled U.S. MQ-9 Reaper.

John Whitehot

you mean the US drone the iranians took over by hacking and landed at an iranian airport? ah no, that was a RQ-170 “stealth” drone, which costs $25 millions, one out of only 20 built and whose top secret technology has already been transfered fully to Russia and China..